Kategoria BISAC: History >> Jewish - General

"Did you come out of personal conviction or are you from Germany?" was the question German Jews were asked when they arrived in Palestine in 1933. Few came out of conviction. The majority of 60,000 German Jews who took refuge in the then British mandate came because they had no other option. Palestine was not the land of their dreams, but rather a place of asylum where one would have to start life anew. Doctors became bus-drivers, lawyers raised chickens, and artists worked as waiters. For the young however, immigration to Palestine was a great adventure, the beginning of a new life free...

After World War II, the center of gravity for world Jewry moved outside Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, large-scale emigration and postwar assimilation resulted in a disheartening contraction of European Jewry, with the notable exception of France. Today, Europe's Jews number only 17 percent of the world Jewish population. At the beginning of this century, they comprised 83 percent and were the center of the modern Jewish experience. In a radical reversal, former peripheries became the centers, notably American Jewry, the largest and most dynamic of the Diaspora communities,...

This is an augmented edition of a superb volume by one of the foremost analysts of European institutions and ideas. Here the late Erich Kahler turns his attention to the special character of the Jewish people, formed uniquely through the interaction of internal and external circumstances in which past and present merge.

The chapters in this book deal with persistent problems of Jewish identity. Kahler claims these can be fully understood only by awareness of the close interconnection between the singular ethnic nature and the unique social structure of the Jewish people. He...

The contributors to this volume throw light on one of the central problems of modern Jewish historiography: How has Jewry and Judaism survived the crisis of the breakup of Jewish traditional society, the transition from the dosed, ghetto existence into a more or less open environment? The process of development, starting in eighteenth-century Germany, gradually encompassed the entire world of European Jewish experience.

Toward Modernity compares modernization in Germany with its counterparts in other countries to see if the German-Jewish development had any influence on...

Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a "Jewish renaissance." At the heart of their program lay a radically new vision of Jewish culture predicated not on religion but on art and secular individuality, national in scope yet cosmopolitan in content, framed by a fierce devotion to Hebrew or Yiddish yet obsessed with importing and participating in the shared culture of Europe and the world. These cultural warriors sought to recast themselves and other Jews not only as a modern...